


trippin’ on skies, sippin’ waterfalls

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Asexual Character, M/M, Magical Realism, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 10:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5703742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry’s on his way home, Zayn’s on his way out, and Niall’s a little magic. Maybe together they’ll find what they’re looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	trippin’ on skies, sippin’ waterfalls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goreallegore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goreallegore/gifts).



> title is from troye sivan's "youth."

Niall meets Harry somewhere between Algoso and Edison, just outside of Bakersfield. The straps of Niall’s pack cut into his shoulders, so he sets his backpack down on the side of the road and digs through his bag for a pair of rolled-up socks. He always packs them near the bottom of his bag with the rest of his clothes, because you’ve gotta pack heavy stuff like your campfire stove and food stock in the middle of the pack. Closer to your spine, more control you have over the weight. Sweat drips from his brow straight into the bag.

He can smell himself in the simmering summer heat, something musky and tangy and effervescent, a smell like youth and exercise. He unrolls his long white tube socks and ties one around each of his backpack straps and tries it out. Eh, it’ll do, for now.

The summer will give way to fall in the blink of an eye, and he’ll have his heavy parka. And he’ll be in the desert soon enough, anyway. He’s only read stories about how cold the desert feels at night, although he can’t imagine it’ll feel any colder than the last few months up in Alaska.

Up there, the cold is a living, breathing thing. It slips its icy fingers into every gap between layers of clothing, into every building crevice and under every doorway. If Niall thinks about it too hard, he can still feel the bright icy fingers of Alaska’s unending daytime crawling between his fingers and up his spine, a friendly death. He shivers, getting another whiff of his fragrant sweat, and reminds himself that he’s not there anymore.

A light breeze rustles through the treetops overhead, and Niall shrugs his shoulders again, adjusting to the weight of the pack. Southern California, outside of the pretty coastal bits, is as flat and shitty as the Texas panhandle. The land slopes into the east so that the sun stays in the sky far longer than it ought to, and all the land beneath it is scorched until it’s sun-bleached. Even the sky itself, a deep, pearlescent blue in coastal Alaska, seems to have been washed out.

Dust licks up and down the scrubby suburban streets with greedy fingers, drawing the nutrients out of the surrounding farmland and spreading it over the city as if to seed the scorching asphalt with sweet juniper or crisp crabgrass. _From dust, to dust._ Niall recognizes the instinct.

He ambles out of the city proper, where there’s nothing but farmland stretching out on either side. Farmers round these parts have been harvesting cotton and grain for as long as colonists have been trying to settle this land, and Niall can see the years beneath the modern moment in the way the soil is graying and dry, and the deep trenches in the fertilized soil furrowed like scars.

Back in the ‘40s, when the Dust Bowl happened, he’d jumped on the chance at labor. Like every other working-age boy back then, he’d straggled his way down to the New York Red Cross center and signed his name to the CCC. Roosevelt shipped ten thousand working boys halfway across the country to plant trees and grass to keep the rest of the soil from blowing straight off Middle America. They did the best they could, but even Niall, who’d managed to keep from getting fired until his supervisor was struck down by typhus and he couldn’t go on pretending that he shouldn’t have had it, too, wasn’t sure that they’d done enough. Somewhere near the southern border of Montana, there’s a tree with his initials engraved in, probably fifty feet high by now.

Hard labor, that was. This is much easier, Niall reminds himself. Even though he’s sweating like a sinner in church and his white t-shirt is sticking to his back with sweat and he can feel the sun beating down on his shoulders, calling up sunburn and blisters. It is what it is.

There’s an art to backpacking, same as there’s an art to piloting or to truck driving. You’ve got to give just enough attention to what you’re doing so that you don’t accidentally crash the plane or drive the truck into a cement median, but you’ve got to master the art of turning off a little bit of your brain, too. Just enough to withstand the tedium without frying it, as the sun beating down overhead.

That’s probably why Niall doesn’t hear the driver until he’s pulled up right beside him. Niall blinks and the world rushes back in from the quiet place he goes back to when he’s not thinking, the old green country and the fairy ring he thought was only an old wives’ tale. There’s a boy leaning out of a jalopy with a running engine, a hopeful smile on his face. Everything about him, from the sweat around his hairline and on his upper lip, to his frizzing curls, to the deep red flush on his cheeks screams _alive, alive, alive._

“You need a ride?” he calls. His voice is pleasant. Niall knows he’s going to say yes before he says no. The boy frowns. “Why not?”

“I don’t know you,” Niall points out. “You could be planning to rape and murder me.”

The boy’s eyebrows draw together, which somehow only redirects the sunlight into his eyes. The green and gold and grey filaments light up like the prisms Niall’s neighbors in Bulgaria, or was it Romania, had dangling from their rafters.

They wouldn’t make any sound, but after it rained, Niall used to love to swing by for a cuppa and a game of cards to look at the multicolored light spackled on the floor like the artist in residence of Niall’s old college stepped into one of his paint buckets. _Alive, alive, alive._

“I’m not a rapist,” he says, laughter in his voice. “Or a murderer. I would feel pretty guilty if you died of heatstroke, though, and I could’ve done something.”

That does it, Niall thinks. Niall ambles over to the passenger’s side door and leans down to peer through the window before he gets into the car. The driver tucks his arm back inside the car. He rolls his window up by hand until it gets stuck three inches from closing, which explains the paper plate he has duct-taped to his sun visor.

Inside, the floorboards of the passenger’s seat are littered with takeaway garbage, empty cardboard cup holders, and receipts. The backseat shows nothing but a heap of laundry held back by a mesh net, and a messy pallet of blankets with a sleeping bag on top. Niall raises his eyebrow. But hey, the guy offered. Niall shoulders off his bag and shoves it over the seat, and then he settles in the passenger’s seat. The jalopy’s antiquated air conditioning system splutters and gasp to shove lukewarm air at him, so Niall peels his shirt off over his head.

His new driver watches him interestedly, like some kind of bird of paradise in a public zoo. The ragged bit of fabric holding his sweaty curls back from his face and the multitude of rings give the same impression, like Niall’s looking at someone too big for the amount of space he’s taking up, so his presence leaks out of him. He smells a little like vanilla and honeysuckle, beneath the requisite scent of boy sweat.

“What?” Niall asks.

“Nothing,” the boy answers, not looking away as Niall buckles himself up.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to rape me,” Niall tells him dryly.

The driver just cocks his head. “I’m an artist,” he defends himself mildly. “Right now, I want to take a picture of you.” He fumbles around the dashboard for one of them crap Kodak cameras, the ones that used to sell like hot cakes at Disney World. He’d been Prince Eric then, or maybe it was one of the other ones, and new to America. There must be at least a thousand pictures of him floating around, steeped in sweat and the swamps of Florida, the smell of rich mud always in his nose, teeming with life. “Can I?”

Niall takes his hat off his head and pushes back his sweaty hair. Then, “Sure.”

So the driver snaps about half a dozen pictures of Niall looking down the lens, looking at the downy hair on the driver’s tanned arms, watching a drop of sweat roll down his sharp collarbone and trail beneath the collar of his mostly unbuttoned shirt.

“I’m Harry,” he says, when he’s done. He thrusts his hand out to Niall, who takes it immediately. Their skin sticks together when they touch, although Harry’s hands a little cooler than Niall’s. Niall rolls the bill of his cap between his hands, pressing his shoulders back against the hot vinyl until his skin absorbs the heat and makes the seat comfortable. “Where you headed?” he asks, tossing a compulsory look over his shoulder before he pulls back onto the winding highway. Now that Niall’s sat in a car instead of looking out at the scrubby plains on his feet, the infinite distance between _here_ and _there_ seems utterly beside the point.

“East,” says Niall.

“Me, too,” Harry says enthusiastically. His low voice rumbles at almost the same timbre of the engine, and Niall blinks, suddenly sleepy. He slumps a little in his seat, spreading his knees like he’s trying to save a seat for his mate on the Tube. “‘M headed home from Berkeley for the summer, I can’t wait to get home and see my mom and my sister. I haven’t seen them for four months.”

Four months. Niall tries to remember a time when that felt like any more than the blink of an eye. “Nice,” he says. “Where’s home?”

“Maine,” Harry rolls his eyes. He does this agreeably, and Niall files that factoid away in the new file he’s opened in his head for _Harry, jalopy driver, potential crazy person:_ kind of a sweetie. Harry reaches out and turns up the radio dial when John Mayer starts crooning about being kind to your daughters, and Niall wonders whether he can ask any more questions. It’s a sensitive thing, being someone’s passenger, especially when Niall’s cheeks are streaked with dirt and he’s got just enough food and money to make it to the Grand Canyon (potentially) without having to call in any favors (probably). Sometimes, people just want someone to sit with them, make the hum of the wheels over the road a little more bearable.

Niall licks his lips and tastes salt. He reaches over into the backseat for his water pouch in the side pocket of his backpack, and once he has it in his hands, he can’t resist. He drops his t-shirt to the floor and leans over the seat so that he can pour a little water into his hands, wash his face and scrub his dirty palms clean. Midwestern dirt has a special ability to get caught in the whirls of your fingerprints, and Niall frowns, wondering how many washes it’ll take to get himself proper clean. He drapes his shirt over his knee to dry.

When he’s done with that, Niall fumbles with the rubbery straw and draws in one, two mouthfuls. No more, that’s enough for now. Have to ration it to make it through these parts.

“You must be a backpacker,” Harry observes astutely. Niall appreciates not being called homeless. He’s got a home, he just doesn’t live there. There’s a difference. “What’s that like? Where've you been?”

“Well,” Niall frowns. Sometimes he hears himself say that and he knows he’s teetering on the edge of becoming Bobby Horan, and he smiles to himself. He hears Bobby’s rolling vowels in his answer, “I went to see about the northern lights.”

Harry jerks the wheel a little when he looks over at Niall. “No way,” he breathes. “Where?”

“Alaska,” Niall answers. Harry keeps looking at him, though, so Niall puts his finger on Harry’s chin and makes him look at the road. “On a fishing boat, actually, off Seward.”

“Wait, hold on,” Harry says, like Niall is some kind of cassette player he’s afraid he won’t be able to pause and replay. “Isn’t that where those dog races are? You know, Balto?”

It’s such a ridiculous question that Niall laughs. “Yeah,” he nods. “Well, no, actually. They moved the starting point of the Iditarod a few years ago.” Ten, a few, it’s all the same, really.

“Okay, keep going.”

“I did see sled teams, though,” Niall has to say. Harry’s mouth, which is as red as if he’s been drinking Kool-aid all day, has pursed into a disappointed pucker. He starts smiling. “This one bloke from Greenland had a team. You’d never seen such a huge man, or such a group of dogs as that. My God, they were beautiful things, with fur thick enough to bury your hand up to the wrist. They smelled like snow.”

Harry’s turned to look at Niall again, so Niall leans out of his seat to turn Harry’s head, gently, back to the road. “And the lights?”

Niall’s bones and joints ache just to think of it. He touches his face, and his cheeks are only a little less rough and weather-beaten as they had been before he’d stepped back onto port four months ago. If he closes his eyes, he can smell the salty Arctic sea water, feel the deck rocking beneath his feet.

“They didn’t come on every night,” Niall says slowly. “The conditions had to be right.” The ship would be rocked by waves all the livelong day, and then the water would grow so calm right around sunset. Niall can almost taste the ozone in the air, feel it prickling at the hair on his arms and the back of his neck.

“But when they did, they’d fall over the water like a shower of light. You’ve never seen anything like it. The deck was always soaking, so I’d climb up to the eagle’s nest and curl up against the cold. It was like a film projected up to the ceiling of the Earth.” Niall takes a deep breath, unintentionally curling his hands to his chest like he can still feel the cold. “It was something else.”

Harry’s looking at him again, so Niall keeps his own eyes on the road. “And when you fished,” Harry prods him, not ungently, “what was that like?”

“Well,” Niall starts, smiling a little. He describes the boat rocking on the waves with his hands, holding the boat as delicately as he’d hold a taco, and halfway through his description of the iron taste of waves and the cold ache of steel in his sore hands, Niall notices Harry make ocean noises with his mouth. He laughs, dropping his hands into his lap.

Harry smiles, adjusting his grip on the wheel. “That sounds fantastic.”

“It was,” Niall says simply. Most things are, in the telling. "What about you?" 

“I was, um,” Harry wrinkles his burnished nose. _Alive, alive, alive._ “I was meant to go on a trip with my mates this summer, but I’ve got an internship, instead. It’s at a law firm,” he adds, as if that explains anything.

Niall sits forward and his knee bumps the glove box. It pops open and spills CD cases all over his lap, so he sets about putting them away. “Oh,” he breathes. _Hell Freezes Over._ “I remember this one,” he says.

“What?” Harry asks, glancing from the road. “Hey, yeah, me too.” Probably not in the same way, is all. Not likely this boy saw them live in concert on that tour, the whole venue smelling faintly of weed and flat beer, the songs like a levitation spell putting gravity on hold for a night. “Put it in. Uh, wait. Hold on, you’ve got to hold the eject button for like four seconds, and then press it again quick – there you go.” _Hell Freezes Over_ is just over an hour long, and Harry clears his throat and turns the volume down when the album loops back over “Get Over It.” “Wanna stop for dinner?”

So they pull into a roadside diner in Tehachapi, California. An easterly breeze blows in the indisputably fresh and earthy smell of natural springs, so that Niall can almost taste the minerals on the breeze. He slides out of Harry’s car and his feet hit the cracked asphalt car park with a solid thump, his knee creaking. Two California Correctional Institute officers buy coffee from the woman behind the Formica counter in the gingham skirt, and two other waitresses, both in the gingham uniform, dole out plates heaping with buttery mashed potatoes, gravy-laden chicken fried steak, and greasy chips. Niall’s stomach gives a ferocious roar. 

Harry and Niall settle into the corner booth, so that Harry can spread his arms over the seatback and tilt his head back, letting powerful air conditioning wash over him. His jaw cuts a severe profile in the oncoming sunset, and Niall can see his pulse pounding in his throat, slow and smooth and steady, thrilling a little with the knowledge that he’s being watched. _Alive, alive, alive._ Behind him, the valley gives way to nothing but rolling desert sands, as far as the eye can see. It feels a little like a precipice, even though there’s no drop-off ahead.

The middle-aged waitress brings them two slick menus, but Niall doesn’t open his before ordering a chocolate milk and chicken strips. Harry, raising one eyebrow, has the same – substituting chocolate milk for regular.

“You’re lucky you’re not fat,” Harry says.

“I don’t eat enough to be fat,” Niall sniffs. In point of fact, he’s always thought he could do with a little more fat or muscle _,_ but no matter what he does, he can’t put on any weight. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t mean it to be an insult,” Harry says, with the overly apologetic tone of someone who delights in getting away with being cheeky. Niall laughs.

They eat without talking very much, although he can feel Harry’s eyes on him, watching the slender, sufficient muscles in his arms work as he cuts his chicken fingers into bite-size portions. “I went through a phase,” he volunteers, when Harry is just slurping at his milk and picking at his sleeves. “When I lived abroad, of eating peri peri chicken as often as I could.”

Harry props his chin up on his head. “I’ve never been abroad,” he admits. “I want to go. Like, everywhere. I wish I'd have been with you, so I could have stories like yours.”

Niall grins sideways. “You’re going with me now, aren’t you?”

Harry smiles, looking all of five years old. 

“Well,” Harry stretches. He left their waitress a heftier tip than Niall quite thought she deserved, but that seems to be the kind of guy Harry is. The desert wakes up around them as night settles in, so that Niall can almost smell the smooth dry skin of desert reptiles and hear the coyote’s cry a mile away, or a hundred. “What now?”

Niall shrugs. “Dunno.”

“It’s still so hot out here,” Harry whines, fanning himself with his hat.

“Bowling alley,” Niall says, spotting the neon lights flicker on just up the road. A knee-high wooden fence borders the dusty highway, and he can count two rabbit burrows just between here and where the dusty mountain rock gives way to shadow. “Those are usually cold, right?”

Harry nods enthusiastically. They trot along the empty highway, Harry’s shoulder brushing Niall’s on every other step like he wants confirmation that Niall’s there. His skin is warm, and he smells familiar now. Niall doesn’t mind it.

They shoulder open the door to the bowling alley, and frigid air con blows over them almost as good as at a movie theatre. There’s a bored-looking girl at the front desk who sorts them out with bowling shoes. Niall sits down at their lane to change his shoes, and Harry goes to fetch their bowling balls.

“This lane sucks,” someone says. Niall looks up and finds another employee in the alley’s uniform of a dingy polo shirt with the bowling alley’s name embroidered above the front pocket. He’s so handsome in the dim fluorescent lights of the bowling alley that Niall thinks it must be an illusion. “Let me change your lane. It’s Mindy, she’s always giving people this one.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Oh, it’s at an angle,” the bloke says. He pushes back a considerable amount of dark, thick hair, and Niall follows him to the next lane over. “All the balls cruise straight for the gutter and Mindy’s like, ‘What’s that about?’” He shakes his head.

Niall says, “You should use a level. ‘Cos, y’know, it could be the balls. Or your shoddy throw.”

The bloke looks up with his tongue pressed up behind his teeth in a smile. “I did,” he says.

“I don’t know which weight you prefer, so I get you the one that matches your eyes,” says Harry, and thrusts a four-pound ball into Niall’s arms. It’s baby blue. He thrusts his hand out to the bloke from the bowling alley and introduces himself.

“Zayn,” the bowling alley guy replies. He draws into Niall’s side a little, stepping back from Harry, like he's a little overawed by it too: the tan settling into Harry’s skin, his skin still desert-hot with it, and his smell like ripe melon and honeysuckle.

“In-Zayn in the membrane,” Harry says, apropos of nothing. “Want to play with us?”

Like they’re five years old. Zayn cocks his head, and then he nods and shrugs, like “Why not?” He even busts out a badly rolled joint for them to share, because he’s the assistant manager so no one can fire him but his manager Sally, who hasn’t been in since her third husband unexpectedly left town with their 1998 Jeep and twenty thousand dollars in debt.

“Have you got the neon lights?” Harry asks, on his second toss. He’s doing much better than either Zayn or Niall, although it probably helps that he seems to care. His eyes have even gone all dark and intense, and Niall adds that to his mental file folder: competitive.

“Sure,” Zayn smiles, so he turns the main lights off, and the blacklights come on. Their teeth look very white to Niall, and the whites of their eyes. Zayn has an ageless beauty, like he might be at once fifteen or thirty-five, or maybe both at the same time. There’s something unbearably mundane in his eyes, the shuttered claustrophobia of someone who feels trapped.

He fumbles with rolling another joint and Niall wordlessly takes the rolling paper and the weed from him, showing him how to do it proper. Zayn doesn’t say thanks, just swallows and lights the bud with a Batman lighter he keeps in his jeans pocket. “What are you boys doing here, anyway?”

Harry lets out a shattering war whoop, turning away from his strike with a little skip in his step.

“Well, Harry’s headed home.”

“And you?”

“Me?” Niall asks. He touches the hair above his ear without meaning to. “Grand Canyon, now. Never seen that one before.” One of the few he hasn’t seen, feels like.

“And then what?” Zayn prompts.

“I dunno, really. Just traveling around. Looking under stones.”

“For what?”

Niall raises his eyebrow. “Hm?”

“Turning over stones for what? How will you know what you're looking for?" 

Niall laughs. "Dunno," he finally answers. "Reckon I'll know it when I find it, huh?" 

Zayn mirrors Niall's own nervous tick, paint dried on the edge of his hand and his fingertips. "Maybe," Zayn says. It sounds a lot like maybe Niall's not looking for anything in particular, and he thinks of the folded-up list in his back pocket of national monuments and landmarks. There's another list waiting to be made when he's finished with this one, and another after that, though Niall's mostly forgotten why. 

Harry’s shadow falls over them; Niall hadn’t realized he was so close. He looks up into Harry’s face, weirdly colored by the blacklight. He touches Niall’s collar, lightly, with his fingertips. “You want to come with us?” he asks.

“I’ve got shit,” Zayn says. “Like, a camper, and paintings.”

Harry shrugs. “You can come back.”

“I’ll bring you back,” Niall says. He doesn’t mean to say it until he does, and then he realizes he means it. Harry’s hand curls around the back of his neck, warm and not entirely unwelcome, and Niall watches Zayn’s face go soft and defenseless. There’s something here he wants. Maybe the open road, maybe new friends. Maybe Harry. It’s hard to say.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s raid the snack counter before we go, I can eat the shit out of some Sour Gummi Worms.”

Harry pops the trunk so that the three of them can squeeze into the back of his car. The sleeping bag and blanket pallet is surprisingly soft under Niall’s back, and with his mouth sparking from the toothpaste he’d spat onto the side of the road, he feels quite comfortable. Used to be, he’d need a proper bed and blanket to go to sleep. And then the Troubles evolved into full-out fighting, and a church collapsed and crushed his primary school teacher under a beam in the middle of confession, and wartime doesn’t allow for blankets.

Harry folds his hand around Niall’s, and Zayn leans into his shoulder on the other side. The ceiling of Harry’s weathered jalopy is pocked with stick-on glo-stars, and Niall lets out a sigh. He watches himself reach up and trace the shape of constellations with his fingertips, Harry clinging to his other hand.  

Clearing his throat, Harry recites, “‘ _Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, / And make me tremble lest a saying learnt, / In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?_ The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’”  

When Niall looks over at him, Harry’s green eyes are soft and vulnerable, terribly knowing. On his other side, Zayn asks quietly, “What’s that on about?”

“It’s this story,” Harry answers. “A woman asked to make her lover immortal, but she forgot to ask for him to stay young, too. Till he withered away to nothing.”

“‘S a good story,” Niall says, and when he turns his head to look at Harry, Harry kisses him. Short and sweet, like something on a playground. Niall looks at his mouth, and then his face, and he discovers understanding.

Zayn heaves a deep breath. “Seems sad,” he says finally.

Niall looks back up at Harry’s homemade constellations. After he outlived his family, he turned to the trees, and now to the stars. Repressed excitement, like the carbonation in a soda, fizzles in Niall’s veins.

“Or not sad,” Zayn ventures. “‘S gotta be one hell of a life.”

When Niall lets his hand drop, Zayn seizes it. He gives Niall’s hand a nervous squeeze. It feels an awful lot like, _Okay_?

Niall files that away. He squeezes Zayn’s hand back. _Good._ He wakes up with Zayn curled tightly around him, and Harry in the driver’s seat, a pair of expensive sunglasses sliding down his nose. “Morning,” Harry says brightly. He watches Niall climb over the seatback and settle in beside him, Zayn making a faint sound of displeasure. “Hope you haven’t changed your mind,” Harry calls, his broken window letting in a solid stream of air cooler than his crappy air con.

“Otherwise we’ve kidnapped him,” Harry mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

“I need a smoke,” Zayn says, his voice croaky. “And a coffee.”

So Harry pulls into a McDonald’s drive-through, Zayn hanging in the gap between Niall’s and Harry’s seats. “Ask for an extra hash brown.” He elbows Harry. “You’re cute. Ask her.”

“Not if I can pay for it,” Harry argues gently. Zayn rolls his eyes and slumps into the backseat, and Niall reaches back to pet his ruffled raven hair. Harry can’t be blamed for not understanding. He doesn’t know what it’s like not to be able to pay.

Harry’s jalopy carries them into the searing Mojave Desert. “This is kind of a shit car, man,” Zayn observes. “Didn’t your parents buy you a nicer car?”

“They did,” Harry says morosely. “I wrecked it.”

“And we’re stuck with the Crap Bucket,” Zayn sighs. Harry brightens considerably. Even Niall’s heart gives a lurch of fondness. It’s _their_ Crap Bucket. (For now, Niall's head whispers to his heart.)

The Crap Bucket’s air conditioning thumps and rattles, fighting a losing battle to keep them cool. Harry's collection of necklaces clinks together gently from the rear view mirror, and even with the windows up, Niall can smell the desert outside: burning sage and rock hot enough to fry an egg on and that inexplicable smell like star dust.

A rooster crows and Niall’s heart gives a weird lurch until he hears it crow again. Harry passes them the hashbrown from his breakfast meal, so Niall gives it to Zayn. He never forgets that everybody else's lives are so much shorter than his, but he's reminded of it with special force now, by these boys who love like it can fill a leaky bucket.

As the miles roll on, Harry and Zayn make up singing games based on what song rotates up on the radio. Niall plays along when he recognizes the song. “Which one is this?” he asks, out of exasperation, when even a song on the oldies station doesn’t ring any bells.

Zayn reaches over the backseat and pulls Niall onto the pallet of blankets, Harry murmuring about how they’re breaking the law, so that he’s got Niall’s head in his lap. “It’s a lullaby,” he says. “Your momma never sang you any lullabies?”

Niall just raises an eyebrow at him.

So, smoothing Niall’s eyebrows down, Zayn croons to him, “ _You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray…_ ”

Niall feels very, very young.

"New game,” Harry says, when the song is over and the car’s gone quiet under Stevie Nicks singing “How Still My Love.” “I spy, with my little eye –”

Zayn socks him in the shoulder. “The fucking desert.”

“Why, yes!” Harry crows. He rubs his arm. “How did you know?”

They pull into Grand Canyon National Park twenty minutes before sunset, just in time to watch the canyon streaked with light and shadow slowly fill with darkness, like a swimming pool emptying itself of light. Harry snaps pictures with his crappy Kodak camera, and then he takes pictures of Niall and Zayn reenacting that bit at the front of the Titanic on the railing around the cliff’s edge, and then he takes pictures of Zayn sketching the canyon onto the back of one of Harry’s receipts, and then he takes one of Niall studying the stream snaking its way through the ravine. Such a little thing of water, and what an effect it’s had.

They gather round Niall’s little campfire stove so that he can cook them all a hearty dinner of ranch style beans and salted pork.

“It’s like we’re pioneers,” Zayn observes quietly. He’s almost always quiet, unless he’s working Harry up into a strop. “It’s rad.”

“It wasn’t then,” Niall says gruffly. “You were more likely to shit your brains out than you were to strike gold.”

Zayn and Harry blink at him. And then they burst into laughter, echoing his accented “shit yer brains out” until the whole canyon seems to reverberate with it.

“Sorry, baby,” Zayn says, squeezing Niall’s cheeks between his palms before he leans in for a kiss. He kisses as sharp as his jawline or his cheekbones, like he’s chiseling an impression of himself into Niall. Harry turns his face up expectantly, so Zayn kisses him next, sweet and indulgent.

They sleep in the open, ‘cos they’re not really sleeping at all. “Look,” Niall says. “You can almost see the Northern Lights.”

And Harry and Zayn pretend that they can. Maybe someday they will.

Harry treats them to breakfast in Flagstaff the next morning. “Well,” he says, planting his hands flat on the table as though he’s about to stand up. Niall hears his own voice in Harry’s “well,” and he wonders how Harry will tell this story. Not his first, but yes, his first, in some ways. _Alive, alive, alive._  “I’ll miss you guys.”

“Love you boys,” Zayn answers easily, spearing one of Harry’s strips of turkey bacon with his fork.

“Yeah,” Harry says, his eyes sparkling. “That.”

Niall and Zayn see him off right off the blacktop highway. Harry hangs his arm out the window and waves goodbye till he disappears from view, nothing but a dust trail left behind.

Zayn turns to Niall. “Now,” he asks eagerly. “How are we getting back?”

Niall pats him on the cheek. “That’s the fun part.”

They find a cattle farmer six hours and two ice pops from the food truck outside. They’re sat on the two creaky wooden rocking chairs in front of the feed store. Zayn chews his straw, and Niall makes polite conversation with all the ranchers that comes through till he finds one heading back west.

“Can you take us with you?” he asks. He gestures between himself and Zayn. “We won’t be any problem, I promise.”

So the cattle rancher lets them ride in the back of his truck. Dry desert winds blow through Zayn’s dark hair, and he sits on the wheelhouse, his eyes closed. He looks like a bird in flight, and Niall sighs, settling his back against the rear window of the truck. Zayn holds his arm out over the side of the truck like he’s about to take off, and he looks at Niall with a smile.

“So now you know,” he tells Zayn. They wave at the rancher, who’s dropped them just ten miles from Tehachapi. Zayn puts his hands in his pockets, kicking at a rock in their path. It’s a long, slow walk down the road, but Niall doesn’t mind. He’s walked more than that. He’ll walk more than that before he’s through. “You’re free.”

“Yeah,” Zayn looks round with a smile.

Niall walks him all the way up to the door of his trailer house, just to be sure. “Erm,” he starts.

“Why don’t you come in?” Zayn asks. He wrinkles his nose, and his eyes crinkle, too. “You kinda stink.”

And, okay. That’s kind of hard to argue with. Niall makes enough tea for two the next morning, and then he quietly gathers his things, careful not to wake Zayn. He scrawls a note and leaves it on the lampshade beside Zayn’s bed, and then he slips out to get back to the road.

The note reads,  _Till every stone is turned. x_


End file.
